We are happy to announce that Evident Point’s founder Yuri Khramov is going to participate at the Digital Publishing Summit Europe 2018.

The DPub Summit is taking place in Berlin on May 16th and 17th. This event will be focused on giving participants an opportunity to share and discuss latest innovations and technological advances in the publishing industry, covering topics such as EPUB 3 interoperability & Readium LCP. Join Yuri for his presentation to learn more about Readium NG and its updates, covering the new iteration of a web-based Readium EPUB navigator, view system, and reading system component.

Evident Point is excited to be a part of this event and to be able to share our experience & professional knowledge as Readium experts. We are very proud of the contribution our team is making to the Readium 1 and would be happy to share our expertise and provide commercial consultations to those building their own readers.

To find more information about the DPub Summit, please visit its official page: https://www.edrlab.org/dpub-summit-2018/

The W3C EPUB 3 Community Group has started work on EPUB 3.2 spec. The main goal – gracefully roll back some of the changes in EPUB 3.1 and create a specification that is fully backward compatible with EPUB 3.0.1, while still retaining most features introduced in EPUB 3.1.

We are pleased to announce that Federal Service for the Oversight of Consumer Protection and Welfare of Russian Federation (Rospotrebnadzor) launched a distant training system for its employees based on ActiveTextbook.

It is no secret that studying can be challenging: browsing through endless textbook pages, taking notes and highlighting half of the page with a yellow sharpie.“Sometimes studying is boring, just deal with it” is what students are taught to accept as an inevitable rule. But does studying actually have to be boring?

Note that the Hypothes.is support is ONLY available in the CloudReader version of ReadiumJS. It is NOT available in the Readium Chrome app. We regret this, but it is simply not feasible to implement that functionality within the Google Chrome app framework

SDK

The licenses for all the source code have been changed from GNU-Affero to BSD 3–Clause.

Online publishing is on the rise and currently there is an abundance of digital content. Since over ninety million people are using e-books, it is absolutely essential for you to stay on top of new trends in the online publishing industry and to make sure your content doesn’t get lost in the crowd.

One of the most requested features for ActiveTextbook is the ability to fill in the blanks left in the original text. We are excited to announce that Evident Point is now working on adding this new overlay to ActiveTextbook!

We are pleased to announce that Evident Point has partnered with eThink Education, a world-class eLearning solutions provider, to provide adaptive and active learning capabilities to Moodle and Totara users.

This partnership provides eThink clients with ActiveTextbook, an adaptive learning tool that enhances student learning, and can be seamlessly integrated within the Learning Management System (LMS). ActiveTextbook takes learners from reading to interacting by allowing Instructors to enrich course materials with videos, images, audio clips, texts, attachments, and interactive widgets, encouraging deeper engagement with learning resources.

Datalogics, Evident Point’s distribution partner and the premier source for PDF, EdTech and eBook technologies, has released ActiveTextbook-based READynamic 3.2 – now with Sony DADC User Rights Management Solution (URMS) support for both PDF and EPUB documents.

SONY’s Right Management System offers a powerful level of industry recognized security that will allow for full content protection. It offers flexible Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection to work with different business models and help businesses create the desired user experience. Continue reading Datalogics releases READynamic 3.2 with SONY DRM

The W3C Publishing Working Group has published three First Public Working Drafts (FPWD), and Evident Point is ensuring that ActiveTextbook is compliant with all three. According to W3C, the three drafts are as follows:

Web Publications – A collection of information defining the structures of Web Publications in a way that user agents are able to provide user experiences that are well-suited to reading publications. These user experiences include features such as sequential navigation and offline reading. The Web Publications include the default reading order, a list of resources, and publication-wide metadata. Continue reading W3C Has Published Three First Public Working Drafts

Currently, around 15-20% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability. This is the case while most websites and software products are not accessible, making it difficult or even impossible for many people to use.

Web is an essential part of daily life for a lot of people and it is crucial to remove barriers that prevent interaction with or access to websites and software products. One example of accessibility is adding alternative texts to images (alt text). Adding alt texts to photos allows visually impaired users to get access to the image information using screen readers. There is even a business case here since in addition to accessibility, adding alternative texts will greatly help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as it provides better image descriptions, helping search engine crawlers to index an image properly. Continue reading ActiveTextbook on The Path of Becoming Fully Accessible

With Active Textbook, quizzes can be made available right inside the book for students to interact with and test their understanding of the concepts as they are reading.

The quiz feature is an interactive overlay (an overlay is an object added to books in ActiveTextbook) that is created in a book. Interactive questions can be created that will be shown after a Reader clicks on the overlay zone. Quizzes can be placed anywhere in the book. It is a great resource for engaging students and making sure they are following along. Continue reading Creating A Quiz In ActiveTextbook

Evident Point, together with our esteemed partners, Hypothesis, NYU Press, Readium Foundation, and EPUBjs, is pleased to announce the successful completion of Hypothesis and Readium integration to bring open source annotation support to EPUBs through Readium.

We are excited to announce that we are going to be exhibiting at the World Conference On Online Learning, the 27th edition of the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) World Conference.

The conference takes place at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto with the theme of Teaching in The Digital Age – Re-Thinking Teaching and Learning. We will be at the conference from October 16th to 19th. If you are attending this event, stop by our booth (#41) and find out how ActiveTextbook is changing the eLearning experience and supporting open and flexible learning. Continue reading We Are Exhibiting At The World Conference On Online Learning (ICDE 2017)!

In this post we will be exploring media overlays and how to add them to your books. Overlays are interactive elements that can be added to the content; these interactive elements can be videos, images, text, attachments, quizzes, links, audio clips, and interactive widgets.

There are two ways of adding overlays to books. The first method is to highlight the text you want to add an overlay to. After making your text selection, a context menu will appear. At this point you can click “Create Overlay.” Continue reading Creating Overlays in ActiveTextbook

According to the Horizon Report, 2017 Higher Education Edition, the next-generation Learning Management Systems (LMS) are virtual learning spaces that support personalization, meet universal design standards, play a large role in formative learning assessment, and are more flexible than traditional LMS. A market study done by Technavio, a leading global technology research and advisory company, suggests that the global next generation LMS market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of more than 26% during 2016-2020. Continue reading Next-Generation Learning Management Systems (LMS)

I’d like to discuss a topic that’s not directly relevant to end users but is very important to businesses hosting and maintaining ActiveTextbook. Specifically, I’ll be talking about hosting and updating ActiveTextbook server software with Docker containers.

Docker is a containerization technology that has taken off in the last few years. The original ground work was laid by Google, but popularized by Docker Inc in 2013. Containerization is a standard way to package server side applications. Packaging all applications in the same manner allows for a efficient workflows and numerous other benefits: Continue reading ActiveTextbook with Docker Containers

We are pleased to announce that Evident Point is in the process of developing a storefront in ActiveTextbook, allowing customers to monetize their books through our platform. The storefront will be available as a fully white-labelled solution, and will implement the PayPal system to allow users a safe and reliable way to purchase eBooks. Our clients will be able to get a branded storefront with a responsive mobile-friendly design to sell their interactive eBooks online. Read more…

Welcome to the “Creating Groups in ActiveTextbook” blog. We are going to show you step by step how to create Contacts and Groups in ActiveTextbook, and how to assign a book to Groups.

Groups

A Group is a list of individual users that can be addressed in a single action, such as granting and revoking access to Books or sending messages. For example, you can setup a Group to represent a class. Each Group has an Owner – an individual user that created the Group and controls access to it. Accounts that are operating under Publisher roles are allowed to create Groups in ActiveTextbook PRO. Read more…

Some devices don’t report precise touch point readings. This results in noisy(i.e., not smooth) scribble paths. We need to clean up the scribble data.

Firstly, we use the Douglas-Peucker path simplification algorithm to reduce the number of points in a scribble. Douglas-Peucker is able to remove about 80% of points while retaining shape of scribble. It works by removing any points that fall near a line between some other two points. Then when drawing a path with the reduced set of points, a shape very similar to the original scribble path is reproduced. Read more…

One of the unique features of ActiveTextbook is that it allows users to add comment boxes to the books and initiate discussions with others. ActiveTextbook is a great addition to Learning Management Systems (LMS) since it allows comment boxes to be created inside the books, which is unlike most systems, where discussion boards are typically located in a separate folder.

With our platform, students are able to share their ideas anywhere, any time. They also have the opportunity to reflect on their thought and check for spelling before posting a comment. Furthermore, the platform is a valuable tool for students who don’t feel comfortable speaking in classrooms. Read more…

Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) is a standard for embedding third party applications into Learning Management Systems (such as Blackboard, Moodle, canvas, etc.). LTI allows a seamless connection of web-based applications that are externally hosted or different tools to platforms that present them to users. Read more…

Hypothes.is is the leading online open platform for annotating the web, while Readium is the largest open source project for consuming ePUB documents.

The goal of this partnership is to bring ebook annotations capabilities to the web. This is what Laurent Le Meur of EDRLabs had to say in A partnership to bring open annotation to eBooks – EDRLab : Read more…

Evident Point Software has joined the Publishing Working Group, by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to work together with other organizations on advancing traditional publishing and Web standards. Prior to joining W3C, Evident Point was a founding member of IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum) which was integrated with W3C in January 2017. Read more…

Readium 1 is now ancient in Internet terms, and there are a number of good reasons for a rewrite. However while that is happening it’s helpful to reuse some of the functionality from Readium 1 with Readium 2.

Although Evident Point was the initial contributor to Readium, there were many organizations and individuals that contributed to Readium over the years. Readium grew organically, to solve business needs at the time. This has resulted in a complex code base that is poorly documented and is difficult for newcomers to understand. To address these and other issues EDRLab announced the start of Readium 2 project at the end of 2016.

Along with resolving issues identified earlier, Readium 2 (R2) aims to define a “Web Publication Manifest”. Readium 1 (R1) was only designed to work with ePUB documents, while R2 is committed to the open web by engineering support for various document types at inception.

Corporate training programs are designed to bring all the employees to the same level of knowledge and skills that is consistent with the company’s standards. In the technology era, training methods such as one-sided presentations typically lead to having disengaged audiences, and therefore, are not the best solutions anymore. Nowadays, it is crucial to have interactive training programs to enhance learning experience and have satisfied and well-trained employees from the very beginning. As it is often said, employees are company’s best assets, and thus, companies need to take advantage of their own talent by increasing productivity and engagement as much as possible. With an effective and engaging training program, new workforce would likely become high-performing and motivated employees in the long run.

Motivating employees to participate and engage in the corporate training programs have become very challenging, and that is why Read more…

Online learning (eLearning) has become a global phenomenon as many educational institutions have entered the field in an effort to improve the student learning experience. While eLearning has many benefits such as cost saving and customizing learning materials, it does have a few shortcomings compared to traditional classrooms.

Two of the biggest disadvantages of eLearning have been lack of student interaction and motivation. In traditional classrooms, students are able to interact with each other and learn from one another by asking questions or listening to comments of others. This traditional environment has greatly enhanced learning and helped students stay engaged and motivated. To bridge the gap between traditional classrooms and online learning, ActiveTextbook provides a platform with interactive features that improves teaching and learning experiences and helps students stay engaged. In this blog, we will look at a few ways instructors can boost the student learning experience using ActiveTextbook:

You’re probably familiar with OAuth2 already. OAuth2 is the technology behind the “Login with Facebook” or “Login with Google” buttons (and many others). OAuth2 is the best way to create a single sign on for two disparate web applications.

With single sign-on (SSO) users do not have to remember multiple passwords when logging into various applications. This becomes especially convenient with applications such as Blackboard, Canvas or Moodle where an instructor embeds an ActiveTextbook document in a course. When a user clicks the book link from within an LMS the user is transparently logged into ActiveTextbook without having to type a username and password, potentially without realizing that they have ended up in a separate application. Read more…

W3C has standardized annotations which is a step towards the right direction. Evident Point is working together with NYU Libraries, NYU Press, Readium and Hypothesis to bring annotation to EPUBs. By working together, this partnership will bring collaboration and cross-platform annotation to eBooks. Which is the next step in bringing hihg quality open annotation implementation to eBooks.

At the London Book Fair, Datalogics and SONY presented an Active Textbook-based READynamic reading system with URMS (User Rights Management System). It’s a new version of Active Textbook technology branded for DataLogics that offers the same interactive functionality and benefits of the original solution; and now with the integration of Sony DADC ’s URMS. The Sony DADC URMS, featured in READynamic, offers a powerful level of industry recognized security that will allow for full content protection, while offering the user flexible content control.

Evident Point has joined W3C community, namely W3C Publishing Business Group that will be working on development of EPUB and related Open Web Platform functionality going forward on a royalty – free (RF) basis. We also joined the EPUB Community Group, which has been as formed, the W3C / IDPF Combination was finalized, to ensure EPUB’s maintenance and advance EPUB’s further adoption.

W3C publishes standards (recommendations) for Web Annotations, which makes annotations first-class citizens of the web. This is an important step in making annotations available on the web, cross-applications and cross-platforms. ActiveTexbook comments are mostly inline with the spec, and plan to extend the support for application-independent annotations.

Active Textbook new version is a deep re-work of our original 1.0 platform, and includes deep architectural changes, as well as very significant changes in functionality , encompassing all components. From the user point of view, the most important changes are: Read more…

Datalogics presented the new version of ActiveTextbook under their brand name of READynamic Plus to a packed house at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany this October. Their presentation, in partnership with SONY, presented a reader on the Active Textbook platform that supports SONY DRM for EPUB3. The integration of SONY’s User Rights Management System (URMS) DRM offers the security of a well-known DRM system for eBooks distributed via ActiveTextbook that is a recognized industry standard. We are very excited about where the interest generated by the FBF presentation could lead!

Evident Point is pleased to announce our partnership with Piron Corp for our flagship product, Active Textbook. Piron is our value-added reseller for Asia and the Middle East. Headquartered in New York, Piron is a leading provider of learning technology solutions. Evident Point and Active Textbook are a natural fit with Piron. Ankur Aggarwal, CEO of Piron Corp., explained that Active Textbook was the only platform he found that met his customers growing needs: supporting interactive digital content, enabling teachers to add additional custom material, supporting both PDF and EPUB based eBooks, and could be readily customized and integrated with various learning management systems.

Did you know the largest group of users for ActiveTextbook.com are from Romania? Each month around 45% of our visitors come to ActiveTextbook from ip addresses in Romania. The top book read is from the Department of Natural History and is a textbook on biology.

Alex Khramov from Bellingham Technical College and Ching Yue from Datalogics presented their perspectives on using Active Textbook at the Learning Impact Leadership Institute in San Antonio, TX. The conference brings together educators and technology leaders to discuss the practical issues digital learning. Ching introduced Active Textbook and discussed copyright management and integration possibilities, while Alex talked about his experience using Active Textbook to augment his online physics class.”

Our partners at Datalogics have started a blog for everyone who is interested in learning more about Active Textbook. Whether you are just using ActiveTextbook.com, or you are interested in licensing the Active Textbook Server solution, there is some great information available for you. Check out Scott’s first post on Getting Started with Active Textbook.

Open eBooks is best described as a “library of opportunity.” Targeting youth in need, Open eBooks makes thousands of popular and award-winning titles freely accessible to children and adolescents from low-income households.

As Readium experts, Evident Point began working on this project with the New York Public Library last summer. With Readium at its core, the app allows children and teens to easily access the full text and illustrations of thousands of titles, which were generously contributed by publishers.

Many thanks to Juan, Raduz, and Ben for their work on this great project.

For more information, please see the official press release from the White House: Now Available: A Library of Opportunity

Evident Point is pleased to work with the New York Public Library on the Open eBooks Initiative. The initiative seeks to make eBooks freely accessible to low-income children and adolescents. Publishers are making thousands of books available through the Open eBooks app, including classics and popular contemporary works. The Open eBooks app and the associated Library Simplified app both are built on Readium

Evident Point is pleased to announce our distribution partnership with Datalogics for our flagship product—Active Textbook. Datalogics is the premier source for PDF and eBook technologies, and we have always enjoyed working with them as a technology partner. We are very excited to have this opportunity to bring Active Textbook to new markets.

Entrepreneur John Locke released his book series “Donovan Creed”, a story about a former CIA assassin, without the help of an agent, a marketing budget or even a background in writing.

However, he didn’t let those circumstances, stop him from achieving literary success. In fact, his business acumen and marketing prowess enabled him to sell more than 1,100,000 eBooks in just five months, making him the eighth author in the world and the first self-published author in history to have crossed the 1 million eBook sales mark.

Such success stories aren’t that frequent, and yet John has mentioned on numerous occasions that his results are in fact repeatable. There are certain underlying principles and conditions that affect human behavior and decision making, which might have contributed to his enormous levels of success.

In the next few paragraphs, you will learn how some of these principles might have played an integral role in making John Locke a New York Times best-selling author, and how the awareness of these principles will help you build and market your brand through eBook publishing.

When Earl finally began visiting publishers, ready with his manuscript, he was asked to leave the documents at the office with hope that he would get a reply soon. The general reply he got after few weeks was in the form of a rejection letter.

A few months later, he was almost ready to give up his dreams of publishing his family memoir. Heart breaking as it was, he woke up and realized that he needed to provide for his wife and his pet Labrador. So far, he was able to pursue his dreams as much he had because his children were grown up and had their own families.

It was 2 am, and Earl was at his laptop feeling a mixture of nervousness, excitement and empowerment, ready to click on the publish button. His wife was fast asleep in the bedroom and the moon was shining through his open window as if congratulating him on this momentous occasion- He was finally ready to publish his own eBook!

The last 4 months had been transformational for Earl because he finally found a way to share his family memoir with the rest of the world. Most importantly, due to some combination of luck and coincidence, he was able to find a community and support network that provided him the tools, mentorship and strategies to launch his own book and share his story with the word. Read more…

Today’s article is a continuation of that article, so In case you haven’t part I of this article series, read it here.

Yesterday, I shared that Jim is facing some real problems.

In fact, just last week, Jim had an extended discussion with his CEO. The message was clear. The company was looking to cut costs in every way possible, and that meant reducing costs for running on-boarding programs. They needed a way to establish themselves as a company that is technologically progressive, sustainable, and customer focused.

Jim just received the third email in a month from the CEO criticizing the increased cost for the internal training program at his company. A cold sweat trickled down his forehead as he sank into his full grain leather chair, staring into oblivion and feeling a mixture of anxiety, confusion and worry.

I’ve got a quick question for you. Have you ever felt the pressure of downsizing or cost cutting?Read more…

Active Textbook co-sponsored the Internet Marketing Mastery Conference in Vancouver. This conference attracted some of the most successful marketers, publishers and thought leaders in the internet marketing industry.

Aditya and Tiffinie had a great time getting to know local entrepreneurs and professionals who were looking for a simple and easy way to share their story and take their audience from reading to interacting! One of the tweets that was shared multiple times by the conference attendees was:

“@activeTextbook is going to #Disrupt the PDF and file sharing system #IMMastery #tech #innovation“

Tiffinie, from the Active Textbook team, co-presented Create [&] Learn at BCLA Connect, the annual conference for the BC Libraries Association. In the session we discussed why Richmond Public Library decided to use Active Textbook as the basis for Create [&] Learn, and we demonstrated how the platform works. There was a lively discussion on the future plans for Create [&] Learn and the endless possibilities of what communities can create and share.

RM Education, the biggest electronic school book distributor in UK, expanded its use of Active Textbook by adopting Active Textbook apps for all mobile reading. This allows students, teachers and, parents to enjoy reflowable content from the comfort of their mobile devices whether online or offline!

Young Drivers of Canada is now using its own private Active Textbook server for driver education. A custom platform was developed for Young Drivers of Canada to expand and support YD’s Anytime, Anywhere eLearning Driver Training.

Richmond Public Library released the second phase of Create [&] Learn. C&L is based upon Active Textbook but was customized specifically for libraries to provide an easy-to-use community publishing platform.

RM Education, the biggest electronic schoolbook distributor in the UK, switched to using Active Textbook for eBook publishing and viewing. RM wanted to expand the functionality of their existing PDF reader and offer an ePUB reader as well. RM chose Active Textbook because it enabled the creation of reports that tracked reading sessions, and could therefore provide feedback to teachers and allow them to customise their teaching to support individual student needs.

Active Textbook reader is now used by ICBC to help prepare you to pass the learner’s (Class 7L) license. We built a reader for ICBC, which was based on Readium and Active Textbook, we also converted their driver training manuals from PDF to ePUB.

The Learn to Drive Smart manual is now viewable as a reflowable document on most mobile phones and include practice quizzes, so users can study while in transit, at home or outdoors!

Check out our new version of Active Textbook with new user interface enhancement. Creation of quizzes is now via the same modal as hotspots was before. This new overlay feature allows authors to inlay images and text into uploaded documents.

Users can now preview images and view video clips/audio clips in any media library by either double clicking a media item or clicking on the preview hover button

Get the most out of your Active Textbook from now on and enjoy reading more with these new features.

The CHOICE e-Collection (CeC) developed by Publishers Row, is the first collection of e-books to consist exclusively of titles reviewed by CHOICE. Soon you will be able to purchase CHOICE e-Collection (CeC) eBooks through ActiveTextbook.

4CIO ActiveTextbook is a collective project of the club for IT directors 4CIO and an expert view of the IT professionals at development of companies and technologies. 4CIO IT experts will be using ActiveTextbook publishing platform as their professional development.

Dmitry Izmestiev, vice-president on innovations of the Group of companies LANIT: “Advantage of electronic work books, created on the basis of ActiveTextbook are university and multimedia. Such book is easy to read from any device, because there are no limits on operation systems. It is possible to add various video materials, graphics, references on different resources and inquiries quickly. High level and newness of the Company’s developments is approved by the fact that top-managers of large companies – experts of IT-sphere – have chosen such solution from LANIT for their projects”

Film Connection Institute is using ActiveTextbook for their online learning programs and interacting with students. The Recording Radio and Film Connection (RRF) provides one on one mentor/apprentice classes in film directing, film producing, screen writing, editing, and general film production.

More News on RRF and their exciting projects with ActiveTextbook are coming soon!

Check out our new version of Active Textbook with new user interface enhancement and added features such as dynamic text, reading mode, and custom dynamic web content implementation. You can easily customize an interactive message by adding a dynamic markup or block of your code from any part of your website for demonstration within Active Textbook coded in JavaScript or HTML.

Furthermore, you are able to look up words using built-in dictionary within Active Textbook provided by Wordnik. Sign up today or sign in with your Facebook account with just one click away.

Get the most out of your Active Textbook from now on and enjoy reading more with these new features.

Evident Point is pleased to announce its partnership with Lambda Solutions in order to enhance the teaching-learning process. Lambda Solutions is a full service Moodle integrator that provides highly customized solutions for clients across Canada and United States.

This effortless integration permits instructors and learners to easily access their selected Active Textbooks within each specific course on Moodle and be able to view, manage, and share their content. Use this efficient solution to improve your students’ learning outcomes.

We customize the Active Textbook and Moodle integration solution packages to meet your needs.
Please contact us via info@activetextbook.com for more information.

The North Vancouver School District has been journeying with us since our beta versions to bring Active Textbook to some of their students and teachers. A group of highly dedicated and innovative teachers, motivated to reach their students through technology, are pioneering the effort to compose and deliver their own interactive learning modules through Active Textbook. To an audience where point-and-click is a norm, they are meeting students in their terms and bringing learning closer. Read more…

Last month, the B.C. government released that they will be developing open textbooks for 40 post-secondary courses to be used as early as the next school year. This is great news! From the first day of talking to our potential users, we knew that one of the most poignant issue for educators is acquiring the source textbooks which they can share with their students. Over the last couple years, we have witnessed the Open Educational Resources movement gain traction and grow. This means that teachers using Open Educational Resources can forego the complicated process of acquiring the license to share digital copies of the textbooks online and the costs associated with it. The vision of equipping teachers with these resources pairs well with Active Textbook since it could be a great platform for remixing and distributing these resources. ActiveTextbook.com could facilitate courses driven primarily with these resources by lending its course-structured nature for educators to group relevant resources and deliver these to students. We hope and expect great synergy from these movements and we are especially excited for this new development in B.C.!

Have you ever seen a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book? It’s a game book where the reader gets to assume the role of the protagonist in the book and make decisions. The book will direct the reader to page X for decision A or page Y for decision B and the reader gets to play out the plot. It is designed so that, once you make a decision and flip to a certain page, it’s not easy to go back to the page you were on before. This is exactly what was happening with Active Textbook with our efforts to help people navigate freely around the book. Bookmarks, hotspot summary, and table of contents were focused on bringing people to specific pages without a way back. This just wouldn’t do! In the newest update of the software, we’ve added a feature to track your previous page so that you can go back to any place in the book as easily as you left it. Now you can flip pages without fear!

The Active Viewer is now fully functional on Android tablets. During our planning stage, we interviewed potential users asking them which tablet they would like to see Active Textbook on. While some were decisive in their answers, others were on the fence because they weren’t sure which devices their students and readers would use. We realized that we can’t expect all of our users to be technology trend forecasters in the ever-changing tablet market and decided that we would strive to compatible with all major platforms. Using the HTML5 technologies, we first made sure that our Active Viewer could be used on the iPad and recently polished off a few features to be functional on Android tablets (using Chrome) as well.

The Lone Ranger attitude for learning was never intended in education. Classes are filled with peers and instructors working together to create an engaging learning atmosphere. So why should online learning be any different? Active Textbook is looking to bring this to the users in simple terms. Students and teachers will be able to share their ideas, ask questions and discuss issues with the new Comment Tool. The Comment Tool is just one of the many new features included in the latest release of Active Textbook! Users can add comments to any part of the book and join in the discussions which are already taking place among their classmates. We also added a Comment Summary Panel to provide an overview of all the comments in the Active Textbook. It’s simple in concept and easy to use!

The international e-Learning exhibition and conference, eLearnExpo, in Moscow was a smashing success! Amongst the 80 presentations made by both local and international experts, the Active Textbook team was presented with the best debut award. The features and sleek design of the new Active Textbook left the crowd thoroughly impressed. More details are available here.

A new version of Active Textbook has finally been released! With no download necessary, the new Active Textbook is now a completely web-based application utilizing HTML5 technologies. Equipped with a sleeker design, social learning tools, as well as cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility, the new Active Textbook aims to improve digital learning for students and teachers worldwide.

Active Textbook was introduced to students taking a course on educational technology at UBC (Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy). After a short presentation, students were encouraged to create their own digital curriculum materials with Active Textbook. During a follow up survey more than 60 percent of all participants indicated that they are “Very likely” to use Active Textbook in their work as teachers.

Active Textbook is about to have a new user interface which looks sleek and modern. Its elegant simplicity will make it easier for users to enhance their digital documents with interactive content. You can look forward to seeing our brand-new appearance in the near future.

The Active Textbook team will be exibiting the latest version of our software at Catalyst For Science on October 21st and 22nd. Active Textbook is proud to participate and to be a part of Catalyst For Science directive to gather information on teacher reviewed and classroom tested science-based resources.

Active Textbook was recently featured at the CUEBC and Catalyst For Science conferences. Our team demonstrated the Active Textbook platform for teachers and school district representatives. There is a strong need for technologies that enable teachers to design and distribute digital courseware. Active Textbook attracted a lot of attention for that reason! Education professionals appreciated how Active Textbook is easy to use and has powerful authoring and publishing functionality. New contacts established during CUEBC and Catalyst will allow us to bring Active Textbook to new schools and school districts.